Background The ability to detect neoplasia-specific fusion genes is important not only in cancer research, but also increasingly in clinical settings to ensure that correct diagnosis is made and the optimal ...

Background Recent segmental duplications are relatively large (≥ 1 kb) genomic regions of high sequence identity (≥ 90%). They cover approximately 4–5% of the human genome and play important roles in gene ...

Background The Tec-family kinase Itk plays an important role during T-cell activation and function, and controls also conventional versus innate-like T-cell development. We have characterized the transcriptome ...

Background The pigment melanin is produced by specialized cells, called melanocytes. In healthy skin, melanocytes are sparsely spread among the other cell types in the basal layer of the epidermis. Sun ...

Pathogenic bacteria continuously encounter multiple forms of stress in their hostile environments, which leads to DNA damage. With the new insight into biology offered by genome sequences, the elucidation of the gene content ...

Background High-density tiling microarrays are a powerful tool for the characterization of complete genomes. The two major computational challenges associated with custom-made arrays are design and analysis. Firstly, ...

Specific guanine-rich sequence motifs in the human genome have considerable potential to form four-stranded structures known as G-quadruplexes or G4 DNA. The enrichment of these motifs in key chromosomal regions has suggested ...

Conditional inference plays a central role in logical and Bayesian reasoning, and is used in a wide range of applications. It basically consists of expressing conditional relationship between parent and child propositions, ...

Background Computational discovery of motifs in biomolecular sequences is an established field, with applications both in the discovery of functional sites in proteins and regulatory sites in DNA. In recent ...

Absolute tumor DNA copy numbers can currently be achieved only on a single gene basis by using fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH). We present GeneCount, a method for genome-wide calculation of absolute copy numbers ...

Background Interaction data for a given protein may be spread across multiple databases. We set out to create a unifying index that would facilitate searching for these data and that would group together ...

Background Microarray Comparative Genomic Hybridization (array CGH) provides a means to examine DNA copy number aberrations. Various platforms, brands and underlying technologies are available, facing the ...

Background Oligoarrays have become an accessible technique for exploring the transcriptome, but it is presently unclear how absolute transcript data from this technique compare to the data achieved with ...

People who are seeking medical advice and care often find it difficult to obtain reliable information about the quality and competence of health service providers. While transparent quality evaluation of products and ...

Background High-resolution magic angle proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (HR1H MAS MRS) provides a broad metabolic mapping of intact tumor samples and allows for microscopy investigations of the samples ...

Background Photodynamic therapy (PDT) involves systemic or topical administration of a lesion-localizing photosensitizer or its precursor, followed by irradiation of visible light to cause singlet ...

This paper addresses the problem of base station coordination and cooperation in wireless networks with multiple base stations. We present a distributed approach to downlink multibase beamforming, which allows for the ...

Background Due to the increased use of genetic modifications in crop improvement, there is a need to develop effective methods for the detection of both known and unknown transgene constructs in plants. We ...

Milk and milk products are nutritious food items containing numerous essential nutrients, but in the western societies the consumption of milk has decreased partly due to claimed negative health effects. The content of ...

Background High-throughput systems for gene expression profiling have been developed and have matured rapidly through the past decade. Broadly, these can be divided into two categories: hybridization-based ...

In literature on quality management design it is common knowledge that quality management will not work without management commitment. But, not always is it possible to achieve management commitment, so what to do then? ...

The publication of a complete genome sequence is usually accompanied by annotations of its genes. In contrast to protein coding genes, genes for ribosomal RNA (rRNA) are often poorly or inconsistently annotated. This makes ...

3-methyladenine DNA glycosylases initiate repair of cytotoxic and promutagenic alkylated bases in DNA. We demonstrate by comparative modelling that Bacillus cereus AlkD belongs to a new, fifth, structural superfamily of ...

A 'new' approach to community building is based on the concept of salutogenesis (a proactive approach to health promotion and prevention). Increasing organisational focus on sustaining healthy work forces requires a coherent ...

Starting with a problem in wireless telecommunication, we are led to study the multiple knapsack problem with assignment restrictions. This problem is NP-hard. We consider special cases and their computational complexity. ...

Background Measles remains a major public health problem in Mozambique despite significant efforts to control the disease. Currently, health authorities base their outbreak control on data from the routine ...

Background Complex traits, which are under the influence of multiple and possibly interacting genes, have become a subject of new statistical methodological research. One of the greatest challenges facing ...

Background A better understanding of the development of metastatic disease and the identification of molecular markers for cancer spread would be useful for the design of improved treatment strategies. ...

Soil bacteria are heavily exposed to environmental methylating agents such as methylchloride and may have special requirements for repair of alkylation damage on DNA. We have used functional complementation of an Escherichia ...

We present an overview of selected computational methods for microRNA prediction. It is especially aimed at viral miRNA detection. As the number of microRNAs increases and the range of genomes encoding miRNAs expands, it ...

Background Worldwide immunization coverage shows an increase in the past years but the validity of the official reports for measuring change over time has been questioned. Facing this problem, donor supported ...

PARALIGN is a rapid and sensitive similarity search tool for the identification of distantly related sequences in both nucleotide and amino acid sequence databases. Two algorithms are implemented, accelerated Smith–Waterman ...

Background In Mozambique, malaria is the principal cause of morbidity and mortality. Efforts are being made to increase control activities within communities. These activities require management decisions ...

Background A limiting factor of cDNA microarray technology is the need for a substantial amount of RNA per labeling reaction. Thus, 20–200 micro-grams total RNA or 0.5–2 micro-grams poly (A) RNA is typically ...

Background Using DNA microarrays, we have developed two novel models for tumor classification and target gene prediction. First, gene expression profiles are summarized by optimally selected Self-Organizing ...